DEMOGRAPHICS REVISIONS

6/11/07: Jon suggests this order for the questions. The first 5 should be mandadory, including politics, which is our most important variable.

Sex

When were you born

Email address [add this note after the text box:](You can put any username you want here. We suggest using your email address so that we can email you your password if you forget it.)

Password [Put this note after the box:] (Make up a password to use for this site.)

How would you describe your views on most political matters? Generally, do you think of yourself as liberal, moderate, or conservative? [Give a dropdown box, with choices from Very Liberal to moderate/centrist to Very Conservative, plus Apolitical/Don't Know, Libertarian, and Other] [Add this note after the dropdown box: (The terms most commonly used in your country may differ. Liberal is intended to include the "left", progressives, and in some countries, socialists. "Conservative" is intended to include the "right," traditionalists, and in some countries xxx. If you think you lean one way on social issues and another on economic issues, then focus on the social issues)

The form continues, but the rest are not mandatory

In what country do you currently live?

[cut zip code; move it to the end of MFQ]

If you grew up in a different country or culture, which one?

[cut "is english your native language"; move this pair of questions to end of MFQ]

[cut ethnicity or race box; move to end of MFQ]

Among the options below, what best describes what religion were you raised with? [then cut Agnostic and Spiritual. Change Christian-Protestant into "Christian: Other protestant denomination"]

Cut entirely: If your religion you were raised with is not listed, specify here: [for the very few others, we don't really care what they are. people can tell us what's missing in the text box at the end of the form]

cut entirely: Among the options below, what best describes your CURRENT religion? [i don't think this is nearly as important as knowning what they were raised as. i don't think it's worth the space to add 2 more religion questions]

Cut entirely: If your CURRENT religion is not listed, specify here

Change religious beliefs to: "How often do you attend religious services? Dropdown box with: Never, a few times a year, a few times a month, one or more times each week

What is your current or highest educational level? [add an option after "some high school" for "currently in high school"]

Move to our upcoming study on attitudes towards candidates: In general, what are your feelings about people who are very liberal, politically? and In general, what are your feelings about people who are very conservative, politically?

This would give us 11 questions at registration, plus moving 6 questions to the end of the MFQ or the upcoming attitudes survey

5/27/07: Sena, Jesse, and JOn met at APS and decided upon the following changes:

1)RELIGION

What is your religion? [dropdown box, not too many choices]

How would you describe your religious beliefs? [5 points, none to very strong]

If you were raised with a different religion, [move to next line and indent] which one? [same dropdown box as above]

[Sena] ---- ANES has a question I liked for religious strength: "Would you say your religion provides some guidance in your day-to-day living, quite a bit of guidance, or a great deal of guidance in your day-to-day life?"

2) EDUCATION

What is highest level of schooling you completed? [dropdown list, with options: didn't finish high school; currently in high school; high school graduate; currently in college/university; college/university graduate; currently in graduate/professional school; graduate/professional degree]

3) COUNTRY/ETHNICITY/RACE

In what country do you currently live? [Dropdown box]

If you grew up in a different country or culture, [move to next line and indent] which one? [dropdown box] [next line and indent] at what age did you move to your current country of residence [box to write in number]

How would you describe your ethnicity or race? [check all that apply. list in alpha order] white/european, east asian, south asian, black/African, latino, middle eastern, native American, last 2 choices: other, would rather not say

4 WHAT ELSE?

zip code? Ravi, can we tell where people are connecting from, what state at least? or should we ask something about region of the country, for Americans?

On our politics self-description, we must have "don't know" and/or "haven't given it much thought". or perhaps also an "other" option? we do NOT want to force people to pick a point on the 7 point scale. Jon suggests offering "don't know" and "other" as options.

remove negative numbers from the liberal end of scale

I [Jesse] think we should make ALL numbers invisible to participants - they don't need to see them

we should remove our promise never to email. Then we could include a check box to allow them to pick "never email me", and if they don't check that, then we can email them a thank you for registering, and an email once a month, or less, to alert them to new scales. The email could be forwardable to friends. We would never email anyone who is already signed up under the "no email" promise.

SCALES WE MIGHT POST

Here is our master list of scales that are candidates for posting (along with comments/justifications) Inlcude citations for each scale, so we know which version to use

moral dumbfounding scenarios? how to quantify dumbfounding as an online DV? would be interesting to show political differences in dumbfounding

F) SCALES THAT WILL BE ON IDEOLOGY 1.0 (2-YEAR DATA COLLECTION ON PROJECT IMPLICIT - GET DATA FROM JESSE AND BRIAN)

1.Belief in a Just World (Dalbert, 1989)

2.Need for Cognitive Closure (Webster & Kruglanski, 1994)

3.Right-Wing Authoritarianism (Altemeyer, 1996; Zakrisson, 2006)

4.Bayesian Racism (Uhlmann & Banaji, 2002, updated 2006)

5.Social Dominance Orientation (Pratto & Sidanius, 1994)

6.Protestant Work Ethic (Mirels and Garrett, 1971)

7.Kay/Jost system-justification scale

8.Jost/Thompson economic system justification

9.Moral Foundations Questionnaire

10.Duckitt’s perceptions of a dangerous world scale

11.Two separate items for economic and social liberal-conservative

12.Multi-item questionnaire with econ/social issues

13.Jost’s acceptance of change and inequality scales

14.Disgust Scale - Revised (Olatunji & Haidt, in press)

STUDIES TO DO

POLITICS STUDIES

pete's idea: I think that very soon we should get a page up that asks people to express their feelings about the presidential candidates. This is something that could be interesting both to scientific audiences and the popular media (how endorsement of the foundations relates to candidate preferences).

do an open-ended study asking participants to define morality for themselves. [but we should NOT do this on yourmorals, because most will have already taken the MFQ]

Add a followup link to the MFQ feedback page, inviting Ps to tell us what we left out, what the 5F does not pick up

Research strategy: let's test conservative and liberal folk theories about the other side. Rather than just testing whether conservatives are high on SDO, we can test the Cons folk idea that libs are low on personal responsibility [ravi's idea]

MORAL JUDGMENT EXPERIMENTS

Pete will come up with the first one

Jesse wants to compare libs and cons on trolley type dilemmas, to see 1. if there's any relation between politics and likelihood to choose the deont. or consequentialist choice; 2. if liberals would be more likely than cons to change their answers when equality of outcomes is pointed out; 3. if we can replicate our 5 foundations patterns by creating personal/impersonal dilemmas for the other 4 foundations (Greene's are all about harm)

Jesse (with Jon, Brian and Nicole Lindner) wants to find out what is sacred to libs and cons by presenting Tetlock-type "how much would you need to be paid to do this" items for each of the five foundations; hypothesis is that sacredness for liberals is concentrated in H and F, so that violations of these take on a blasphemous quality not seen by conservatives (possibly related to Ditto and Pizzaro's study on shouting racial epithets in the forest)

MORALITY INTERVENTIONS

Jon wants to try studies to make people less moralistic, perhaps the morality log study being tested by Selin

Ravi wants to...?

PERSUASION EXPERIMENTS

Jesse and jon are interested in whether political persuasion (support for policies and candidates) can be increased by matching foundations used in an appeal to the foundations endorsed by the listener.

MISC IDEAS

How to submit a scale to the site?

So that you guys have a bit more control and I don't have to be so much of a gatekeeper to adding your studies, here are some guidelines for submitting your own surveys/studies....

The Basics

Your survey/study will be a collection of text files that you'll email me. It could be as few as 2 files for a single survey and feedback page...or it could be more if you want to have participants go through multiple pages.

Filenames

Make your filename relatively unique and descriptive. Your feedback page should be the name of your firstpage plus "_process". In addition all filenames should end in ".php". So for example, the Schwartz scale has 2 files, "schwartz.php" and "schwartz_process.php".

Headers

At the top of every study page should be this snippet of text which will take care of validating the user, collecting any data submitted from previous pages, etc...

<?
include "studytop.php";
?>

At the top of your final feedback page should be this snippet....
<?
include "feedbacktop.php";
?>

The Form Tag

After the header for study pages (not the feedback page) should be this form tag...

<form action="NEXTPAGE.php" method=post><?

NEXTPAGE should be the page that you want to go to next. For single page studies/surveys, make that page the name of your feedback page. If you are doing a mutiple page study, each page should name the successive page in place of NEXTPAGE.

Defining Question Format

You need to add the following 4 lines to define your scale.

$scalename = 'SCALENAME';

$scaletype = '7pt';

$scalebegin = 'not at all relevant';

$scaleend = 'extremely relevant';

The first line name of your scale...it will show up in your SPSS data file..it should be different for each page
The second line defines how many points your questions scale will have.
The third line defines the text for the beginning scale endpoint.
The fourth line defines the text for the bend scale endpoint.

Defining Questions

For each question, add a line like this to your file...

addtoquestions('Whether or not someone believed in astrology');

If you want, you can define custom endpoints for a particular column by adding more information to this line...

An example...
addtoquestions('Whether or not someone believed in astrology', 'Not Relevant!', 'Extremely Relevant!');

Add as many questions as you wish.

Display Instructions

Add this next to your file...

?>
INSTRUCTIONS TEXT
<?

Your INSTRUCTIONS TEXT should be in html if possible. You can use frontpage, dreamweaver or even microsoft word and cut/paste the relevant parts in if you want. Or you can write text and then replace all carriage returns with <br> and add "&nbsp;" wherever you want to add a space. Enclose anything you want bold in <b> and end it with </b>. I'm happy to clean this up for you or help you with it.

Display Questions

Add this to display questions

showallquestions(1);

The number 1 in parentheses will display questions in the order you put them in the file. If you put a "0" in the parentheses, the code will randomize the order of questions.

Page Footer

Add this to finish your page....

showfooter("BUTTON TEXT");
?>

Replace BUTTON TEXT with whatever you want your submit button to say. For example, maybe you want it to say "See your results" and have your page go to the feedback page. Or "Continue" if your page goes to another part of the study.

The Feedback Page

The feedback page is basically a bunch of HTML/text which describes your survey. As noted above, it is named "_process.php" and begins with this tag...

<?
include "feedbacktop.php";
?>

After that, it can have almost any form as you can write whatever feedback you wish...However, you'll likely want to give them some visual feedback on their score and want to intersperse graphs with your text. Add graphs using these tags...

The numbers in each of the "vars" lines corresponds to the questions which contribute to that bar length. The user will be given a bar length equal to the average of their scores. An R before a number indicates reverse scoring.

The showgraph line has a few things that one will want to change. You can change "self" to "others" if you want to show bars for others on the site. Eventually, I'll add a type of graph that combines self and others.

Replace "Graph Title" with whatever title you want for the graph.

Replace "Labels Title" with whatever you want to call each of the bar labels (ie. Foundations for the 5 foundations scale).

OLD STUFF IS BELOW THIS LINE -- SECTIONS AND PARAGRAPHS WE NO LONGER NEED

Marketing ideas (Getting Traffic)

I think it will be easy to direct traffic to our site. I do a few radio and magazine interviews every month, and can just mention the site once its up. And my happiness hypothesis page gets 60 unique visitors a day, from all over the world. I can put a link on the front page, we should get a few a day from that. And if the site is rewarding, it will spread by word of mouth.--Jon

Adwords Campaign?

Scale-a-thons: we can offer sororities or other groups the opportunity to give us data for money that we would pay to their charitable cause. Such people would simply enter a special word in our open field on the registration page, e.g., "UVA Kappa Kappa Gamma", and then we'd pay them, say $5 if the person does 5 scales. This might be particularly good for getting people to do ALL our scales.

Issues/Policies attitudes

Please indicate the extent to which you support each of the following policies/issues by checking the appropriate option. 1 - strongly oppose to 7 -strongly support - I'm adding more policies/issues that I took from a recent Jost et al. study. [Sena]

Increased funding of the military

Abortion

Stem cell research

Spending to improve education

Spending for the poor

Spending to improve/protect the environment

Capital punishment

Same-sex marriage (I think "same sex" might be a less threatening way to put it than "gay" for some people)

Affirmative Action policies

Stricter sentencing for drug offenders

Tighter immigration restrictions

Government-sponsored national health care

Maintaining tax breaks for large corporations

Protecting large budgets for police departments

Pete's thoughts on picking issues: I suggest we basically pick the key contemporary culture war issues, but with an eye toward finding issues that map onto each of the 5 foundations. We can confirm these relationships empirically later, but try to cover the bases up front. Re the format of the questions and response options, I favor ones with an affective flavor — get people to respond to how they “feel” about abortion, immigration, etc. Lots of evidence suggest that these items are better in a lot of ways, and it actually makes the items simpler to respond to -- don’t need complicated items were you construct nuanced versions of the abortion or immigration issue — just get people to respond in a straightforward pro-con, like it-don’t like it way. Again, we want to use standard items/response options whenever possible, but I favor this basic approach. Another good resources for these items besides ANES, etc. is Linda Skitka.

Legal details, etc.

Just to avoid any possible future hassles, we may want to think about who 'owns' or gets to publish whatever data we collect. Is the site open to all morality researchers to collect data? Perhaps Project Implicit provides a good model for these potentially sticky issues?

[jon]For the first year or two, i think it should just be a collaboration among the 5 of us. It will be hard enough to manage, and to get enough traffic to satisfy all our research fantasies. We also don't have a grant, as project implicit does. Perhaps in the future we could look into doing that. And perhaps we could "vote" to admit a few new members into our collaboration. But unless we have a full time programmer and administrator, I think we should just keep it simple.

[Jon] As for authorship: I think our general spirit should be (and is likely to be) cooperative without being fully communal. That is, I don't think we should assume that every study run here is a joint venture that all 5 of us would be authors on. But on the other hand, to the extent that any of us make more of a contribution than just offering advice at the early stage, that person would become a co-author. If Ravi is doing most of the work to help us all collect data, then Ravi might be in a position to deserve authorship credit more often, especially for our early projects. I want to be sure that everyone benefits from this collaboration, especially the grad students who have more of a rush need to get authorships. I think what's likely to happen is that we'll each put up a few studies more or less separately, and then find that it makes sense to write a manuscript that combines multiple studies. Or Pete or I will be invited to write a theory paper or review paper, for which it makes sense for us all to work together. So I expect that we'll see many joint-authored projects. But each of us should feel free to put up a simple questionnaire or study without feeling that doing so automatically invites co-authors. What do y'all think?

Jon has it exactly right here I think. I don't think we have to assume that everyone is part of everything that goes on on the site. Like any other research endeavor, it should depend on whether people contribute to projects, intellectually and/or logistically. In this sense I also think that Ravi might end up on more things than others, given his crucial technological role. I don't suspect any of this will be a problem with this group -- and ideally, of course, this kind of joint site will promote a lot of discussion and collaboration. We will have to figure out a way to pick and choose what is up on the site -- as I suspect it only makes sense to have a small number of project front and center at any one time. I don't have a good sense for how a website for this works -- how much can be up and available at once to maximize efficient data collection -- but we will have to sort this out -- Pete